Terms of Service

Effective October 20, 2026

These are the terms for using Tongs. They are short on purpose. By signing in or using Tongs you agree to them.

What Tongs is

Tongs is a web app, operated by Tongs in the United States, that turns a recipe link into a step-by-step cooking lesson with timers. It is currently a private beta: you need an invitation to sign in, and features may change or disappear while it is being built.

Your account

You sign in with a Google account. Keep that account secure; anything done while signed in as you counts as you. One account per person. An account that abuses Tongs, other users or the recipe sites it fetches from may be closed.

Recipes and other people’s content

The recipes you add belong to the websites and authors who published them, not to Tongs and not to you. When you add a link, Tongs fetches that page at your request and reshapes it into a lesson for your own personal, non-commercial cooking, much like printing the page. Do not use Tongs to republish, resell or redistribute recipes, and respect the terms of the sites you take them from. If a site or author asks Tongs to stop fetching their pages, Tongs will.

Anything you post to the feed stays yours. By posting it you let Tongs show it to other Tongs users for as long as the post exists.

Lessons are generated by software

The steps, timings and tips in a lesson are produced by software, including an AI model, from the original recipe. They can be wrong. You are responsible for your own cooking: check temperatures, cooking times and allergens yourself, and use your judgment on food safety.

Free and paid tiers

Tongs is free during the beta, with a monthly limit on recipe imports. A paid subscription that lifts the limit is coming. When it arrives, the price is shown before you pay, payment is handled by Stripe, and you can cancel at any time from the app. Cancelling stops future charges; the current period runs to its end and is not refunded unless the law where you live requires it. Prices may change with at least 30 days’ notice in the app or by email.

Fair use

Do not use Tongs to break the law, to overload or scrape the service, to get around the import limits, to harass other users, or to fetch pages from sites that have asked not to be fetched. Tongs may limit, suspend or close an account that does.

No promises

Tongs is provided as is, with no warranty of any kind: it may be unavailable, lose data, or stop existing. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. To the fullest extent the law allows, Tongs and its operators are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages, and total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid Tongs in the 12 months before the claim.

Ending things

You can stop using Tongs at any time and ask for your account to be deleted, as described in the Privacy Policy. Tongs may end the beta or the service itself with reasonable notice, and will give you a chance to export your recipes first.

Changes to these terms

If these terms change, the new version is posted here with a new date. For a change that matters you will be told in the app before it takes effect. Using Tongs after that date means you accept the new terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and the federal laws of the United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute will be heard in the state or federal courts located in California, and you agree to their jurisdiction.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to tongs-support@googlegroups.com.